Trillian

I have been useing Trillian for several months now, and have found it both a blessing and a curse.

Right after installing it, I started to observe strange behavior from my system. I use Windows 2000, and periodically Trillian will try to grab all of my system's processor for itself. This will continue until I manually close it with the Task Manager. I even wrote to the programmers with this problem, but never got a reply.

Also it frequently gets booted off of the chat servers. But when I close then restart Trillian, that goes away and they connect on the first try.

This is version 0.74 I use, and now I see that they are trying to sell version 1 for $25. So apparently this is nothing but a wide spread beta test for a commercial product. But unless version 1 is a major improvement over 0.74, do not waste your money. The problems with Trillian are not worth it.

As I write this, I am forced to remove Trillian. This is because it will not connect to ANYTHING other then IRC anymore. And it badly corrupted my ICQ database. So unless you are willing to be a test subject, avoid this program.

I too have been using Trillian for several months and have experienced minor problems. However the convenience of being able to login into one application rather than having several different programs at once far outweigh any minor difficulties. I am so impressed with the product that I've decided to upgrade to the Pro version of the product but I'd have no hesitation in recommending the free version to anyone who uses more than one Chat program. As a small point to note, there are few other alternatives to this product since most don't seem to be actively developed anymore. No wonder really since this beats them by a mile. Cerulean Studios ARE actively working on Trillian (both Free and Pro editions) and have released several patches over the past few months to remedy known problems. I think they've done a great job, its a quality piece of software and remember it is free.

I found it to be very difficult to add any contacts after initial installation and setup. I was never able to use it because I could not get it to connect properly to any other IM than Yahoo.